A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies
by Bartolomé de las Casas
An account written by the Spanish Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas in 1542 (published in 1552) about the mistreatment of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas in colonial times and sent to then Prince Philip II of Spain.
One of the stated purposes for writing the account is his fear of Spain coming under divine punishment and his concern for the souls of the Native Peoples. The account is one of the first attempts by a Spanish writer of the colonial era to depict examples of unfair treatment that indigenous people endured in the early stages of the Spanish conquest of the Greater Antilles, particularly the island of La Hispaniola.
Las Casas's point of view can be described as being heavily against some of the Spanish methods of colonization, which, as he describes, have inflicted a great loss on the indigenous occupants of the islands.
His account is largely responsible for the passage of the new Spanish colonial laws known as the New Laws of 1542, which abolished native slavery for the first time in European colonial history and led to the Valladolid debate. The images described by Las Casas were later depicted by Theodore de Bry in copper plate engravings that helped expand the Black Legend against Spain.
Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World
by David Brion Davis
Winner of a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award, David Brion Davis has long been recognized as the leading authority on slavery in the Western World. Now, in Inhuman Bondage, Davis sums up a lifetime of insight in this definitive account of New World slavery.
The heart of the book looks at slavery in the American South, describing black slaveholding planters, the rise of the Cotton Kingdom, the daily life of ordinary slaves, the highly destructive slave trade, the sexual exploitation of slaves, the emergence of an African-American culture, and much more. But though centered on the United States, the book offers a global perspective spanning four continents. It is the only study of American slavery that reaches back to ancient foundations and also traces the long evolution of anti-black racism in European thought. Equally important, it combines the subjects of slavery and abolitionism as very few books do, and it connects the actual life of slaves with the crucial place of slavery in American politics, stressing that slavery was integral to America's success as a nation—not a marginal enterprise.
A definitive history by a writer deeply immersed in the subject, Inhuman Bondage offers a compelling portrait of the dark side of the American dream.
This was the first english translation of Bartolome de las casas 3 volume book Historia de Las Indias;translated and edited by Andree M. Collard. This is a really important book dealing with the history of the early spanish conquest and its colonization of the indigenous people and the Americas of which has not been fully translated in its entirety.
In 1523, Las Casas joined the Dominican order and withdrew from public events for several years. His consuming task during that period was to write the History of the Indies (published posthumously), a monumental rendition of the Spanish conquest. Part history and part prophecy, Las Casas' chronicle of Spanish misdeeds was intended for future generations to be an explanation of Spain's punishment by God, which he felt certain would happen.
"Fray Bartolome de las Casas, convertiendo a una familia azteca" by Miguel Norena
The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution
by C. L. R. James
A classic and impassioned account of the first revolution in the Third World.
This powerful, intensely dramatic book is the definitive account of the Haitian Revolution of 1794-1803, a revolution that began in the wake of the Bastille but became the model for the Third World liberation movements from Africa to Cuba. It is the story of the French colony of San Domingo, a place where the brutality of master toward slave was commonplace and ingeniously refined. And it is the story of a barely literate slave named Toussaint L'Ouverture, who led the black people of San Domingo in a successful struggle against successive invasions by overwhelming French, Spanish, and English forces and in the process helped form the first independent nation in the Caribbean.
Haiti's revolution has always been a point of pride for people of African descent around the world. It was in Haiti that slaveholding European colonizers were finally driven away at the hands of the island's black population. The Black Jacobins dramatically and powerfully recounts the events that led up to the bloody and history-altering Haitian revolution of 1791-1803.
The revolution began in the wake of the Bastille and ended in the French colony of Santo Domingo, one of the wealthiest colonies in the world due to its rich natural resources and its importing of cotton, indigo, and coffee. Forever tied with the revolution is Toussaint-Louverture, a barely literate slave who united the slaves and mulattos of Santo Domingo and led them against the ruling population of the colony, as well as French, Spanish, and English forces, to alter the fate of millions of people and shift the economic currents of three continents.
"In 1789 the French West Indian colony of Santo Domingo supplied two-thirds of the overseas trade of France and was the greatest individual market for the European slave-trade.... The whole structure rested on the labour of half-a-million slaves." In 1791, after decades of inhumane and savage treatment by their "masters," the slaves revolted-led by one man, Toussaint-Louverture. "One of the most remarkable men of a period rich in remarkable men. The history of the Santo Domingo revolution will therefore largely be a record of his achievements and his political personality.... Between 1789-1815, with the single exception of Bonaparte himself, no single figure appeared on the historical stage more greatly gifted than this Negro, a slave till he was 45 [sic]. Yet Toussaint did not make the revolution. It was the revolution that made Toussaint."
Miguel Street is a semi-autobiographical novel by V. S. Naipaul set in wartime Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago. Naipaul wrote it while employed at the BBC using a BBC typewriter and "rustle-free paper."
The novel presents a series of separate episodes of childhood experienced by an unnamed narrator, all happening in and around Miguel Street, a street in western Port of Spain. The book contains a number of idiosyncratic characters, including Mr. Popo, the carpenter who never finishes making anything and is always working on the thing without a name; the poet B. Wordsworth (taking his last name from English Romantic poet William Wordsworth) who is working on the greatest poem ever written but has never written past the first line; and Man-Man, the mad man who becomes a prophet. The book is the story of great ambitions that never went anywhere and are only left for the narrator to remember and record. The narrator himself is part of a group of kids on the street who get into various adventures in the neighborhood. Only the narrator manages, by the end of the story, to escape from Miguel Street and leave Trinidad, with the hope of making something of himself.
The story is written primarily in the first person, with each character getting his or her own chapter; the narrator's experiences are woven in-between, except for the last two or three chapters, which are primarily about the narrator himself.
